Star Citizen Dev Talks Call Of Duty ‘Fatigue’ & Publisher ‘Guessing’

With games like Roberts’ Star Citizen finding great success and funding through Kickstarter, the traditional publisher system, and all the associated issues that come with it, has come under fire.

“You’re pitching to the real audience and they’re putting money down to buy it,” explained Roberts of the Kickstarter system and it’s closeness to gamers. “It’s one thing to walk into a publisher, and publishers are really guessing to what people want when making decisions and they don’t really know.”

“A lot of the people making the decisions don’t really know and that’s why they all tend to stick to the safe stuff. ‘Oh, well Call Of Duty’s selling really well, let’s make a military FPS!’ But, I don’t think that’s necessarily true; if you’re always looking at what was working yesterday you’re not going to be picking stuff that works for tomorrow.”

Not only that, but with traditional publishers less inclined to take risks and fund innovation, Roberts discusses what he describes as ‘fatigue’ of certain games and genres, highlighting the Call Of Duty series in particular.

“You also get that fatigue of getting the same old thing again,” explained Roberts. “Games like Call Of Duty or whatever, when they were first around they weren’t the big thing and they didn’t sell as many units as other big games. To become a big franchise you’ve got to take risks at the beginning. And Kickstarter or crowd funding is an avenue to help facilitate that.”